musings of a medical librarianhttps://ilk21.wordpress.com
and mutterings about anything else that takes my fancy!Mon, 19 Feb 2018 10:33:20 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngmusings of a medical librarianhttps://ilk21.wordpress.com
Decision making and biashttps://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/decision-making-and-bias/
https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/decision-making-and-bias/#respondSun, 09 Jul 2017 17:24:17 +0000http://ilk21.wordpress.com/?p=959Last week I went to ‘The Art & Science of Clinical Problem-Solving’ by Professor Sanjay Saint. It was a great presentation, interactive and engaging, and despite (as well as?) being pretty much the only non-clinician in the audience I learned a great deal.

While I’m not involved in any clinical decision making, there’ plenty of decision making that goes with my job, and even more that goes with life – and insight into the amount of bias, conscious or not, that comes with each decision, and the process of coming to a decision can be a huge advantage.

Now I wont go into all the possible forms – there’s Wikipedia, postgraduate qualifications and books aplenty on this. The forms that Prof Saint focused on were:

availability bias
when we just don’t have enough information, yet we might make a decision/come to a conclusion anyway. Sometimes this is because we’re feeling pressure to take action, but it might be because we’ve already decided what we want to do and just want to get on with it, despite subsequent information perhaps warning against it.

anchoring bias:
that we pay too much attention to one piece of information (likely to be the first piece of information we receive), and then this skews our decision making from here on. (this is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell in a nutshell)

confirmation bias
when we only look at new pieces of information as evidence to confirm our first conclusion.

premature closure
that when we come to a conclusion we stop hearing new information, which might otherwise require us to change position, or to at least reconsider our first conclusion.

framing effect
This is how we come to a conclusion based on how the information is presented, rather than on what the information is.
We can use this to our advantage (particularly when we want someone to do something they might be otherwise reluctant to do), but you have to know what will ring the other persons bell if you want it to work.

I’m afraid to say that I know myself well enough to know that I often fall into the trap of several of these – and that I don’t spot (or ignore) at the time and fail to work harder against my natural tendencies….. but maybe with the next decision I make it will be different, eh?

]]>https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/decision-making-and-bias/feed/0ilk21the_cognitive_bias_codex_-_1802b_biases2c_designed_by_john_manoogian_iii_28jm329#uhmlg17 – Happy birthday UHMLG – here’s to the next 10 yearshttps://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/uhmlg17-happy-birthday-uhmlg-heres-to-the-next-10-years/
https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/uhmlg17-happy-birthday-uhmlg-heres-to-the-next-10-years/#respondSun, 09 Jul 2017 16:27:22 +0000http://ilk21.wordpress.com/?p=915A tenth anniversary for any organisation is quite a milestone, and not least for UHMLG – University Health and Medical Librarians Group. I’m lucky to have been on the committee for the past year, and thoroughly enjoyed putting together this years programme with my colleagues.

All the slides from the event, and a bit more detail about the even are available on the UHMLG blog, so here’s some of what I considered my highlights/take-homes from the event.

Alison Day spoke about her leadership course. I thought she introduced a tremendous discussion topic, by asking us to have a super-speedy knowledge cafe on “what makes a good follower” – great to have the topic turned on its head, and a useful reminder that a good leader needn’t be in a management position. Nor does being in a management position automatically make you a leader – plenty to think about here.

There were several standout moments for me from Adam Young and Taryn Jackson’s talk about what primary school children are taught. The level of computational thinking that they encourage was fascinating, and perhaps needs to be taught retrospectively to those who’s primary school years are long behind them. Perhaps the whole concept of “process fixing”, or process mapping means at least some of these skills are ingrained already, but I don’t think it would do any harm for me to seek out some further training in this area.

Amy Icke gave me a light-bulb moment when she said that her secondary school students thought that books carried more weight (ahem!) than journal articles: that they didn’t really understand the difference, and considered “magazines” as being of less value. This prompted me to consider the starting point of the dissertation sessions we run for our undergraduate students – who’ve primarily only had book-based reading to do up till that point. We march in, talking about pubmed and searching, and referencing, but should maybe start from the point of “why should you be looking for articles as well as/instead of books?”, “what’s the difference?”, etc.

We also got a great example of how a lecturer has embraced a new way of teaching their students, when Tim Vincent introduced us to the way that one of the lecturer’s has completely transformed the way he delivers his teaching – by using interactive tools, by chunking up the presentations into shorter blocks, and using video. Tim included lots of different tools into his own presentation, and the possibilities are really exciting. I used Padlet recently to get feedback from a lecture hall full of students who were working in small groups, and I think it’s something I’ll be exploring more.

Do watch it, it’s a really useful reminder of stuff we know, but sometimes don’t put into practice.

Finally, I was really excited by our first “peer assist” – well at least a version of this knowledge management technique. I asked everyone to bring along a challenge that they were facing (anonymised to protect the innocent), and then shared them out to get the hive mind to suggest solutions. While we’ve not shared this on the UHMLG blog, the collected problems and proposed solutions were shared amongst all attendees, and I found it fascinating as a process. This knowledge management malarky is actually pretty useful!

There was plenty more I could say, but mostly I’d say join us! If you’re a health / medical librarian working in HE in the UK, please join us. We have a spring forum: 23rd March 2018, and a summer residential event, and together with the email discussion list, they’re all great ways of getting together with HE colleagues to discuss common problems and topics that are interesting to us all.

It’s free to join, and I’ve got a lot from all the events I’ve attended, as well as from the (continuing) experience of being on the committee with a great bunch of colleagues. Happy birthday to us!

Hope to see you at the next UHMLG event.

]]>https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/uhmlg17-happy-birthday-uhmlg-heres-to-the-next-10-years/feed/0ilk21#eahil2017 #icmldub Global and Disaster Health Special Interest Group: Evidence Aid and me 2/2https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/06/25/eahil2017-icmldub-global-and-disaster-health-special-interest-group-evidence-aid-and-me-22/
https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/06/25/eahil2017-icmldub-global-and-disaster-health-special-interest-group-evidence-aid-and-me-22/#respondSun, 25 Jun 2017 11:52:20 +0000http://ilk21.wordpress.com/?p=883In the past few weeks we’ve been overwhelmed with examples of extraordinary courage from ordinary people. People who have run towards danger, whether it’s been their paid role or not. It’s truly humbling and inspiring. I don’t like to assume that I would be able to act so selflessly (and hope I never have to put it to the test). These sudden flash points sometimes require an instinctive reaction, as well as a planned and rehearsed response.

Natural disasters and epidemics require a slightly different response from those who go to help. Organisations like Medicine sans frontier, Doctors of the World, Red Cross and many more have extraordinary teams who come together in times of crisis. The story of Will Pooley might be familiar to you. I know one doctor, with significant experience in emergency medicine, who has gone to virtually every crisis in the past 25 years – from war-torn Sarajevo, to famine-ravaged Sudan, the earthquakes in Nepal and Haiti, as well as the effort to stem the spread of ebola in Sierra Leone. A highly skilled and highly experienced medic who also sees part of his role to be bearing witness and then advocating for the professionals involved on his return.

But outside the highly dramatic, glamorous? world of emergency relief work, there is a political landscape that can have consequences for peoples’ health. There are also many people who try to help those who reach our shores fleeing political persecution, working for organisations like Freedom from Torture. I know a GP who volunteers by writing medical reports which form part of the appeals procedure when asylum seekers have had their initial applications turned down. The report gives expert opinion on whether the asylum seeker has scarring (physical or mental) consistent with torture. The conversations, between doctor and asylum seeker, usually with the aid of an interpreter, are harrowing for all parties. Interestingly part of the benefit to the asylum seeker, beyond the legal document, is the opportunity to tell their story, to be heard.

I can’t do any of that. I can’t run into a war zone, or the aftermath of an earthquake, date stamp at the ready, and do anything useful. I don’t think I have the emotional resilience, never mind the medical skills to be able to cope with a conversation about the torture that the person in front of me had sustained. And that was starting to make me feel pretty impotent. Even a monetary donation didn’t seem very satisfying, though it was something I could and did do.

My skill set is different, which is why, when I heard about Evidence Aid, I thought – now’s my chance! I came across Evidence Aid rather by chance, because I follow CEBM on Twitter and noticed a tweet about their partnership.

I had a poke around on the Evidence Aid website, and saw lots of words that matched my skill set – systematic reviews, evidence summaries, open access publications. I came the conclusion that this could be my way of doing something practical.

I dropped them a line, had a lovely conversation with Claire Allen, and discovered that librarian volunteers were exactly the sort of people they needed to support their work in summarising and synthesising evidence on various topics – the big one at the time was Zika Virus.

So here I am, 6 months in, andwhat does it actually mean to volunteer for Evidence Aid?

I’m just about to submit my 9th summary of a review on Zika & Dengue (I’ve got to know a lot more about Zika than before, but you don’t need to be an expert by any stretch). I get a couple of papers at a time, and have taken roughly 2-3 weeks to summarise them. The workload is very flexible – I just keep in touch, and say in advance if I’m away, or unable to take on more work.

Using a mixture of Slack, Mendeley and Dropbox, I liaise with the project coordinator, Shona, via Slack. She assigns me a paper using a shared group on Mendeley. There is a standard format for presenting the summaries (I draft mine using Google Drive) which I then upload to Dropbox. Shona gives them the once over, gives me any feedback via Slack (this was very helpful in the beginning, and I’m pleased that I seem to be getting the hang of it now!), and then the summaries are loaded onto the Evidence Aid website. Really simple.

Now I have to confess that there are additional benefits to the warm and fuzzy feeling that I’m actually doing something socially useful (yes, I know, simply by being a librarian I’m doing a socially useful, but you know what I mean, I hope).

I get to practice the synthesising and summarising skills which I want to develop for my day job. But that’s ok, isn’t it? Everyone wins.

I would thoroughly volunteering for Evidence Aid, or a similar organisation – it’s only as much of a time commitment as you are able to offer, lets you contribute to a really worthwhile aim, and might let you practice a professional skill that you mightn’t otherwise be able to.

The aim is to provide an international platform (held each year) for actors that contribute to the generation, use or dissemination of evidence in support of humanitarian action, to share and discuss views on the topic, and to promote related activities.

]]>https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/06/25/eahil2017-icmldub-global-and-disaster-health-special-interest-group-evidence-aid-and-me-22/feed/0ilk21evidence_aid_logo21workflowhew-logo-with-image-925x405-draft01-20170620#eahil2017 #icmldub Global and Disaster Health Special Interest Group 1/2https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/eahil2017-icmldub-global-and-disaster-health-special-interest-group-12/
https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/eahil2017-icmldub-global-and-disaster-health-special-interest-group-12/#respondMon, 19 Jun 2017 16:46:03 +0000http://ilk21.wordpress.com/?p=865On Thursday at EAHIL there was the launch of a new special interest group – Knowledge management in global & disaster health. For the last 6 months or so I’ve been doing voluntary work for Evidence Aid (more on this in the next post) so I went along.

Claire started with an overview of the origins of Evidence Aid. After the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 a government funded psychiatrist responded to a Cochrane offer of help. The group was able to provide evidence of the unproven benefits or even potentially harmful effects of brief debriefings for survivors. Feeding this back to the government meant that funds and resources could be deployed elsewhere.

They have continued this work to support better use of resources (both money and manpower), and achieved registered charity status in 2015.

The aim of Evidence Aid is: To create and satisfy an increasing demand for evidence to improve the impact of humanitarian aid by stimulating the use of an evidence-based approach.

The work they do depends heavily on the work of volunteers, with librarians particularly involved in searching for, summarising and synthesising evidence. They also advocate free access to pay per view systematic reviews. If you’re interested in the story of my connection with Evidence Aid, please see below.

Neil then talked about an organisation I’m sorry to say I was unware till now: “Health Information For All”. But even as Neil was speaking, I signed up to HIFA– which will mean that I can take part in conversations with their 16,000 members in 175 countries, across 5 forums.

It’s not just about ensuring that aid workers, and their organisations are working with the best evidence. Everyone deserves to have access to and the skills to appraise (health) information. Without supporting and enabling these 2 things, we deny them a basic human right of informed choice and further burden the healthcare systems by only minimal (or even harmful) self-care being possible. As Neil said “people are dying from lack of knowledge”. And indeed one of the WHO Universal Health Coverage goals specifically mentions information: skills, equipment, INFORMATION, structural support, medicine, incentives, communication

Amongst the wide range of projects in they are working in: with healthcare professionals, with citizens, with healthcare policy makers, around mobile healthcare information, they also have one with library and information services. This last project is around supporting local LKS to support their local healthcare professionals, citizens and policy makers. They also want to explore the role of LKS in global and disaster health.

This last point led to Caroline speaking about the brief review she carried out on the role of librarians in providing support to disaster management teams and the general public during times of crisis. (NB this is not about librarians coping with their own disasters – eg how to cope with a flood and its effects on a collection, or even worse, the circumstances that the Syrian librarians are enduring).

This was about (amongst other things)

how public libraries in particular can be a community hub during times of crisis, acting as a meeting point, communication channel and even performing such basic functions as being a charging station or internet connection point.

new roles which being created, such as Global Health Informationist, or Disaster Information Specialist (like we needed more job titles! )

how effective knowledge management can link members of the same organisation who are unknowingly working on the same topic (how many times does that happen?);

how our existing skills we can support information dissemination using social media; and

how we are already working to reduce the digital divide which is so glaring at the best of times, and which is only exacerbated in crisis situations.

A clinician in the audience who had worked in disaster zones raised the very specific point that access to evidence was important, but putting it into a local context was critical: it’s all very well know that water can wash a wound as effectively as saline (so cheaper) but if the water supply is contaminated then it’s appropriate to ignore that evidence. Or that the logistics of transport severely restrict access to the saline to begin with. This is also an area that Evidence Aid will be expanding into – getting right information for the specific context and environment that the aid workers are facing on the ground.

Maria then spoke about her personal perspective, as a librarian, indeed as a professor of information science, living and working in Uganda, and from her association with AHILA and IFLA. Maria was one of the founder members of AHILA in Nairobi in 1984.

The challenges facing librarians in sub-Saharan Africa actually resonate very much with me as a European librarian: that the provision of information is increasingly complex, and that there is increasingly disparity between info-rich and info-poor owing to variations in access to the internet. That Maria and her colleagues have a significant and active role to play during epidemics and natural disasters on their doorstep is only where the difference becomes clear owing the lucky distance I enjoy from most of the health disasters that I might be accessing information about. What Maria does is to use “Knowledge to transform the resources we have into things we need”.

She’s got a new book out “Informed and Healthy: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on the Value of Information to Health Care” (which had a high profile launch), which is already winging it’s way from Amazon.

In terms of next steps, from the SIG’s perspective, its:

HIFA LIS Project working group meeting is on 27 June at 10am, via Skype

Thematic discussion on the role of libraries in times of crisis, to take place on the HIFA Forum

]]>https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/eahil2017-icmldub-global-and-disaster-health-special-interest-group-12/feed/0ilk21evidence_aid_logo21hifa-logo-webScreenshot_1#icmldub #eahil2017 CEC6: Librarians can help address reporting concerns in the biomedical literature, particularly for systematic reviewshttps://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/06/13/icmldub-eahil2017-cec6/
https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/06/13/icmldub-eahil2017-cec6/#respondTue, 13 Jun 2017 16:39:03 +0000http://ilk21.wordpress.com/?p=843So I’m delighted to say that my 2017 EAHIL experience is off to a flying start. I’ve just come out of the CEC session I co-ran with Shona Kirtley of @EQUATORNetwork, Tom Roper @tomroper ‏, Rebeca Isabel Gomez @Rebeca_Aetsa and Alicia Gomez @fagomsan on how librarians can help improve the reporting of research. Putting together the session was great fun – wonderful to have an international collaboration, and the skype meetings, and email exchanges were really productive.

A colleague suggested that if you integrate your search results with a PRISMA reporting guideline it raises the researchers awareness of this checklist as a gold standard method of reporting the rest of their work (definitely going to steal/borrow this one!)

For example

There is a wealth of literature/evidence available to demonstrate a] the level of poor reporting of research, and b] that librarian input can improve this. I’ll be putting more of this evidence into presentations, onto our website etc.

As well as the stellar “50 Shades of Review” that Andrew Booth presented as part of the EAHIL CPD programme, a colleague said they’d share the table he made which presents the different types of review against how many databases, and an estimation of the time it should take to present.

We talked over the reasons why research is poorly reported, and the consequences of it. We were reminded of the scale of the problem – immense!

And we rounded off with a reminder that, as with so many things, this isn’t solved by someone else doing something. It’s solved by each one of us doing something – so we all wrote postcards with 2 or 3 actions that we were taking away. I’ll be posting these cards in a months’ time – as a reminder that we need to be part of the solution.

Our slides will be going up shortly, and we’ll also be sharing the feedback from group discussion – watch out for the link.

]]>https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/06/13/icmldub-eahil2017-cec6/feed/0ilk21#candocafe – the first “Can Do Cafe” for NHS librarianshttps://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/candocafe-the-first-can-do-cafe-for-nhs-librarians/
https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/candocafe-the-first-can-do-cafe-for-nhs-librarians/#respondFri, 07 Apr 2017 12:42:41 +0000http://ilk21.wordpress.com/?p=828On Monday 27th March, 20 NHS librarians of the East of England enjoyed the very first, anywhere, Can Do Cafe. In the reasonable expectation that you don’t know what one of these is, the essence of the event was :

“All staff are welcome to attend, but you must be prepared to come along and get actively involved,
take away an action and do it.”

It’s so easy for us to get into a rut of “this is rubbish, why doesn’t someone do something about it” – it’s not possible for all of us to solve all the worlds ills, but there are some things that are within our grasp, regardless of what grade we’re working on. So the point of the cafe was to be an opportunity to think about the things in our working life that we could improve, and to get inspiration from colleagues by hearing about how they approach the same situation. And then get on and take some action, however small!

I’ve never been to one of these before (more information about them if you’re in the same boat), and to a certain extent I have to say the lack of formal outcomes/actions was a little difficult, but the point was to learn, and get something for me and my library. We chatted in small groups for c.15 mins and then mixed up the groups and chatted again. We did feed back round the whole group at the end, but this was optional. I certainly learned some good suggestions for library inductions, sorry if they’re obvious to you, eg:

introduce the library service at a staff induction, and then wait a few weeks, and introduce yourself again. Corporate inductions are notoriously information heavy, plus staff will take a little while just to settle in, so give them a chance to find their feet, and remind them of the services we can offer

better tailoring of OpenATHENS registration emails – I’ve been meaning to do this for ages, so this is a definite action

Touted as a mini-teachmeet, actually it was pretty much full size, with 7 speakers. Topics ranged from #amilliondecisions, supporting systematic reviews, preparing an elevator pitch and coaching/mentoring skills training. So much was packed in to each presentation I can’t capture them here, but it reminded me what a good forum TeachMeets.

There was so much discussion after each presenter that it became clear that we’ll need to re-think the time allocations for each part of the next Can Do Cafe (happening Wed 7th June, btw), and we’ve already had a good debrief about how to make the next cafes even better.

The whole Can Do Cafe came out of just such a conversation between Leanne Kendrick, Deborah Lepley, Laura Wilkes NHS librarians in Kings Lynn, Chelmsford, and Bury St Edmonds respectively, and me. So to a large extent, by having an knowledge cafe via conference call, the 4 of us came up with an idea of a way to fill what we saw as a gap. The perfect example of trying to take control, and make a change ourselves, rather than relying on anyone else to fix it for us.

The opportunity to catch up with colleagues, and to meet with vendors and suppliers is always appreciated, so I thought I’d gather my thoughts of the day. The slides will be up on the UHMLG blog, and the tweets (#uhmlg17) has been storified, but here’s what I took from the day.

Alison Brettle

Alison is always an interesting speaker, so it was great to hear her talk about the impact of librarians.

So often our evaluation questionnaires after the training sessions we deliver focus too much on enjoyment. To be frank, whether a participant enjoyed it or not is irrelevant. What’s important is the connection between what contribution you made to the outcomes that matter. Yes you as a librarian are an input, and you do activities. These activities have an output, and too often it’s this that is measured. What is actually more important is the outcome. The “so what”. “So what’s” can happen in the short, medium or long term, but we need to be able to show our contribution to these outcomes, because it’s these that are the things that matter to our key stakeholders.

Impact – it’s not just about measuring things, counting. This just shows you can count. What different do you make – “impact is about the serious business of demonstrating the difference that libraries can make”. There’s always the downside that we can demonstrate what contribution we make, rather than a direct cause and effect, but it’s a start.

It’s by showing our contribution to the outcomes that matter that allow Alison to create diagrams like this:

There’s a significant need for all of us to ask the same questions – these can be part of a bigger set of evaluation questions, but if we’re not asking the same questions, we can’t compare results. Alison and her colleagues in the Task & Finish Group have worked hard to devise 4 simple questions – there’re in the Value & Impact Toolkit, and we’d be well advised to use them.

Return on investment is a seriously convincing argument when presented to stakeholders, and one which has been made in Australia and the US. It would be great if someone in the UK did more work towards answering this question.

Anne Gray

Becoming business critical was the rally call from Anne – her slides are available. She’s been embedded and business critical in the evolving beast that was the PCG and is now the Commissioning Support Unit. Since the NHS is a business, help the decision makers, just as much as the practitioners. In the Department of Health mandate for NHS England 2017 they list research, innovation and growth as key factors. If librarians can’t demonstrate their contribution to all three, we’ve come to a sorry pass. But it’s how we communicate and demonstrate this that’s important. Are we doing it in a way that convinces them, or just convinces us?

In her role Anne’s had to learn a different language – business reports, bullet points, summaries – if it’s not quick and easy to read, the time-poor managers will never be able to incorporate it into their work. (It makes me all the more envious of my colleagues who are attending her “synthesising and summarising” workshop.) Perhaps the need for pragmatism is key – evidence needs to be “good enough”, so the whole idea of an evidence hierarchy is turned on its head.

I’m regularly reminded how weak I feel my skills inn searching the grey literature are, and Anne gave a timely pointer towards Kieran Lamb’s “North Grey Literature Collection” (note to self – ask the fantastic team behind the EAHIL CPD group if they have a session planned around grey literature, but I realise that significant aspects of it are country specific.) Anne presented a great slide with all the different sources of grey literature she uses:

Perhaps the biggest skill that Anne can’t teach you is how to find the key people in the organisation. I wonder how we test for networking skills at interview, or teach it after appointment.

Kate Kelly

While CILIP is beavering away with the PKSB, and David talked about how K4H contributed to making a Healthcare PKSB, the MLA has also been working on core competencies.

The MLA asked key questions around what is the practice of health information professionals?, what is our common skill set? what are the assumed skills of someone who calls themselves a health information professional? This survey was sent to “leaders of the profession” in the US, and thanks to Kate’s involvement, to members of EAHIL and UHMLG too. The aim was to establish and define the knowledge, skills and abilities that can be observed, measured, taught, but interestingly they don’t extend to cover personal attributes or ethics – and sometimes these are what makes the difference between competent and brilliant colleagues.

There’s 6 key areas (locates ; curates; educates ; manages ; evaluates ; promotes), and Kate drilled down on a couple of these, and talked about the differences between basic and expert levels.

She also shared the competencies from 2007 and compared them with the 2017 version. What was once a specialised skill (eg in relation to technology) has now become a standard expectation, so tech just doesn’t appear in the 2017 list.

There was an interesting emphasis on the need for librarians to be able to apply evidence to their own practice.

check out the MLA site on 9th May when the competencies will become available (open to all), and 16th May when the self-assessment tool comes online (MLA members only)

Gerhard Bissels

We had a fascinating insight into a life in parts of Europe as a medical librarian. Gerhard works in Bern, but is German. He pointed out that the number of English-speaking librarians (in UK, US, Australia) was significantly bigger than the number of German-speaking librarians, and with that difference, and therefore the pool of colleagues from whom to learn or collaborate.

He talked about the balance of unqualified apprentice staff to qualified staff, and how that meant that certain tasks and skills were getting lost (particularly teaching and searching skills – this to the extent that an Embase subscription is a rarity in Germany). Even the availability of a postgraduate qualification in librarianship was lacking in some countries, or only newly available in others.

So to the meat of the presentation – the results of a survey of European librarians on further/postgraduate education. The survey was developed by a working group consisting of Gerhard, Rudolf Mumenthaler and UHMLG’s very own Betsy Anagnostelis. This is published in full in Journal of EAHIL (page 4), and the background data is also made freely available.

Really, it quickly became clear that however much we might moan, UK health librarians don’t know how lucky they are.

David Stewart

He alluded to the ongoing work that will transform LQAF into an evaluation framework which will be closely linked to K4H, and illustrated the 6 differences. The result should be increased partnership working, and confidence, capability and capacity in LKS.

There needs to be some baseline work carried out (eg asking how much time currently is spent on outreach/clinical librarian work, so that any change/increase can be measured). We can’t grow numbers of staff in specific roles, or the amount of time on specific tasks if we don’t know the baseline. David also reinforced the guiding principles and values of K4H (p17, as if you didn’t know!)

On the last guiding principle, there was talk of the “healthification” of CILIP’s PKSB into the PKSB for Health. There was also a reminder that we could point our managers towards this tool, since if they don’t really understand what we do, then how can we be effectively appraised? The Learning Zone was sign posted, as was the Talent Management Toolkit.

Always a stimulating day, and a great opportunity to meet with colleagues. Thanks UHMLG.

]]>https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/03/29/uhmlg17-spring-forum-tooling-up-knowledge-skills-competencies/feed/1ilk2123 Things is 10 years old – here’s a few ways it’s helped mehttps://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/03/17/23-things-is-10-years-old-heres-a-few-ways-its-helped-me/
https://ilk21.wordpress.com/2017/03/17/23-things-is-10-years-old-heres-a-few-ways-its-helped-me/#respondFri, 17 Mar 2017 12:07:10 +0000http://ilk21.wordpress.com/?p=769Realising that Helen Blower‘s ground breaking 23 things programme is 10 years old is quite a shock. It was inspired by Stephen Abram’s article about 43 things, but 23 seems to have become the perfect number.

I thought about the ways it had helped me…not quite 23 ways, but enough. More than enough….

infinite others…..some of which I’ve participated in, some of which I’ve “encouraged” my colleagues to participate in

Helped me spawn a different type of cheap, engaging and imaginative CPD opportunity: libteachmeet, which was translated from a forum for teachers, and has been adapted and rethought repeatedly for and by librarians – see the wiki, the original blog, and the chapter about it , oh, and another presentation at the Istanbul conference

Encouraged me to learn from others as much as learning from the “teacher” – it’s the reading of other participants blogs that teaches you as much as following the steps of the task for the “Thing”.

It was a great opportunity to hear what are the important issues for research nurses, and to get an insight into the amazing work they do.

I’m made a story of the tweets from the event (other people’s tweets will have much more insight than mine, I know) https://storify.com/ilk21/cbrsymp16, but here’s a few take-homes that have stuck in my mind.

personalisation of medicine

It’s an amazing thing to realise that Cambridge patients have given researchers the data to prove that there are not 4 different types of breast cancer, but 10 owing to genomic distinctions. One size/shape of treatment does not fit all. This personalisation of treatment is an amzaing breakthrough. But unless you personalise the treatment through taking time with the patient who’s just received the diagnosis, who’s about to undergo the treatment, and whose family members have perhaps died from what they see as the same disease, you’re not really caring as well as you could. Unless you personalise the opportunity for healthy volunteers to contribute to the research you’re not going to have a massive dataset to work with.

It’s often the research nurses who take the time to connect with the patients and volunteers.

Nurses will be in very short supply in the coming years – 12% intake in the coming year but 20% loss as experienced nurses retire or leave the profession.

How can we ensure that all nurses are engaged in research, so that every nurse is a research nurse, with the potential for every patient (every citizen) as a research participant?

help them/us understand

Research literacy of patients and volunteers is really important for recruitment and retention – there’s lots of expert patients (particularly in Cambridge!), so why not lots of research expertise? Better understanding will help engagement and retention of research recruits. This starts with the quality of patient information which is designed by research groups, and is used to ensure informed consent, but can stretch beyond that too.

translation and communication of results

Do the patients involved in the research the courtesy of presenting the results of the research that their cells/bodies/minds have contributed to, in a way that they can understand. I don’t mean dumbing it down (see above) but in a way that is meaningful to them. Do this and you might get them to engage in research in the future.

are you a linchpin?

Linchpins make the work happen, efficiently and safely. Who are the linchpins in your organisation? (psst – it might be you!) How can they be rewarded? Can you learn how to become one?

It’s taken me so long to write up my thoughts after this conference – but the jist of it was done in 20 minutes over coffee just after I’d left building.

It was great to get an insight into the world of research nurses – impressed, doesn’t even begin to cover it!

As well as all the opportunities to catch up with colleagues from around the country there were first class speakers (as usual!)

Murray Hope works for HEA, and he spoke about the forthcoming Teaching Excellence Framework. Quality assessment should be seen by institutions as an opportunity to reflect on what went badly as well as to showcase what went well. To simply sweep less successful outcomes under the carpet is missing the point, and might lead to a lack of innovation just in case it doesn’t work. It’s the same with only using metrics to measure success – they miss some of the nuance. So too much reliance on the National Student Survey is easy, but not enough.

A very brief overview suggests that in the first year TEF will be effectively a rubber stamping exercise to ensure institutions demonstrate they have processes in place. Year 2 will require the whole institution to take part, but here’s the interesting part… Year 3 will be a pilot year for subject submissions as well as institution wide, and Year 4 will be a subject only badge.

The real opportunities are for subjects to shine in their own right, and there’s even more opportunity when specialisation increases. For example, there’ll be recognition for excellence in delivering courses by distance learning. Obviously the OU will be gunning for this, because it allows other aspects of the institution to be recognised. (could this be an opportunity for librarians and their services to be given recognition?)

We don’t know yet just how granular this process will be (eg delivery of ancient history teaching in a university might be a very different experience from the history teaching), but it’s going to become increasingly important that any teaching delivered and supported by librarians would be well supported by a formal qualification (the like of which HEA can provide).

The next session was from Sheila MacNeilof Glasgow Caledonian University on Learning Analytics – a brave new world or back to the future? Her slides are here:

There was so much to take away from Sheila’s excellent talk – hugely engaging speaker. But ideas like the fact that learning analytics use trances that learners leave behind to help us improve their learning – what a fascinating idea.

She reminds us that people and process are much more important than the product or the platform, but most fascinating was the prospect of trying to accommodate and monitor the social learning that goes on and can have as much benefit for the student as the formal learning. [this makes measuring the impact of our contribution in the way that Alison Brettle was encouraging us to do yesterday all the harder, surely….sigh!]

The problem with analytics so much of the time is that, in true Voltaire fashion, that just because you can measure things doesn’t make them the most valuable, and sometimes the most valuable are things that are difficult to measure. And at the end of the day you can measure all you like, but if you don’t change your behaviour, then what was the point. And sometimes it’s ok to be good enough…. (dangerous thoughts!)